It sounds like a joke: “You know that film where Tom Hanks plays the ‘fixer’ for the Irish mafia in the Midwest? Never heard of it? Oh, it’s directed by the guy who directed the two Bond films, Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015) and features Paul Newman as the mobster, Daniel Craig as his spoiled son, and Jude law as a necro-pathic killer and photographer.”
But it’s not a joke. It’s real. It’s Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition (2002).
Tom Hanks levies threats, guns-down gangsters, robs banks (only Capone’s money though), and even dines-and-ditches at a road-stop eatery! It’s a good film, the cinematography is beautiful, and both Newman and Hanks are winsome in their roles.
But there is something funny about the film: namely, what it is supposed to mean. The trailer and the film reviews will tell you, obliquely, that the film concerns itself with the relationship between fathers and sons and the alterations of joy and sorrow that rut that relationship. And while this holds to a degree, it misses something profound going-on around and within the dynamics between fathers and sons: the role of limits.
Set in 1931 the film explores the ravages (economic, local, familial, etc.) wrought by unfettered, unboundaried, expansion; of unfettered and unqualified progress. Ever-present in the film are the various avenues by which people are pursuing a limitless progress: Captial desires limitless expanse of production, Unions desires unchecked control of labor, the Mob desires unchecked control of their control over “the things men do after work”, Jude Law’s Harlen Maguire wants an unchecked pleasure of “being alive” —which he gets by killing people and then taking their photos (he “owns” their last moment). Life, it seems, is a thing to be taken, and taken without end.
But sons and fathers are each the other’s check on limitless power. Sons and fathers set the borders on the other’s expanse. And their joy is precisely in the giving of the self to make room for the other. This is the radical suggestion of the film, framed modestly by the opening and closing shots on the shore of Lake Michigan: perhaps true joy, true experience, true self-expression, is the result not of limitlessness, but of border and boundary. Lake Michigan is, after all, a lake and not an ocean. It finds what it is precisely in being bordered. So also Michael Sullivan Sr. (Hanks) finds joy and true life precisely in the act of denial, limitation, sacrifice, and self-giving. The denial of this self-giving dynamic between fathers and sons is the root of its own rivalrous breakdown.
Lucan tells us how Caesar asked in Egypt of the origin of the Nile and how what he wanted was to hear the tale of the river which had no limit —an idea he had of himself as well (de Bello Civili, X.214-412). But limitless expansion is an illusion tragically chased, one which for Caesar too engenders war with a son (in-law). Unchecked expansion has been the ruin not only of the relations between fathers and sons, but also of empires: of Caesar’s Roma and of the American Midwest. Only when we stop attempting to gambol ourselves into God’s seat, posturing ourselves as the limitless one, only when we receive ourselves with our boundaries from the One without limit or end, the Alpha and Omega, do we begin to enjoy the gift of life.
Easter alone offers us a picture of life without end in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. From here we are made heirs of a “world without end”. But that world is not one of limitless expanse, or unchecked self-aggregation. It is a world in which precisely as it is given, received gratefully, and laid-down, is it taken back up and received. All of the limitations of the Cross are the path to eternal and boundless joy. Sons and Fathers are called to lay everything down. And insofar as they do this, they rightly fit the image of the Eternal Son and Father.